The personal blog of Peter Lee a.k.a. "China Hand"... Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel, and an open book to those who read. You are welcome to contact China Matters at the address chinamatters --a-- prlee.org or follow me on twitter @chinahand.

Thursday, May 15, 2014

Big Bullies and Local Nationalism in Vietnam and Ukraine

First off, Vietnam.

There has been some bewilderment expressed as to
why Vietnamese--demonstrating against the PRC’s provocative positioning of its
HYSY 981 oil rig in waters claimed by Vietnam as part of its Exclusive Economic
Zone--attacked Taiwanese factories.

The answer is depressingly simple.

Anti-Chinese prejudice—including prejudice against all
Chinese, including Taiwanese Chinese, PRC Chinese, and Vietnam’s own ethnic
Chinese citizens—is baked into Vietnam’s current political and social
narrative.

It is not a matter that Vietnam was colonized by China in
the far off imperial era or, for that matter, the fact that Chiang Kaishek’s
KMT army behaved extremely poorly when it made a clumsy play to claim northern
Vietnam as part of China’s political sphere immediately following World War II.

Anti-Chinese sentiment grew out of the Vietnamese government’s
sense of threat in the 1970s, as it pursued its alliance with the Soviet Union
while spurning the People’s Republic of China.

Ethnic Chinese dominated the commercial sector of the
economy, especially in recently liberated/conquered Saigon, and were seen as an
undesirable social element capable of disloyalty to the Communist government, divided
loyalties vis a vis the PRC, and also serving as a key component in the bourgeoise
economy that presented obstacles to the socialization.

So the Vietnamese government adopted and implemented
various policies hostile to its ethnic Chinese community.Hostile enough, in fact, that over half a
million ethnic Chinese fled.Here’s a
good, if perhaps dated, discussion of the period.

Remember the “boat people” of the 1970s?Maybe not.But they were predominantly ethnic Chinese Vietnamese.

The Vietnam government also implemented extremely harsh
measures against Chinese communities in Cambodia during its invasion to topple
the PRC-backed Khmer Rouge.

This combination of toxic elements contributed to the PRC
invasion of Vietnam in 1979 which, in a development little recognized in
Vietnam today, was executed by the PRC after US president Jimmy Carter gave
Deng Xiaoping the green light as part of the whole “contain Soviet influence in
Asia” exercise (now, of course, succeeded by the whole “contain PRC influence
in Asia” exercise).

Distrust of Chinese—not just China i.e. the PRC—is still an
essential social and political element in modern Vietnamese nationalism, as well as the government’s effort to maintain its a central, legitimate position in that nationalistic narrative.

So, it’s not much of a stretch for angry nationalists
demonstrating against a (PRC) Chinese oil rig to burn down an (ROC) Chinese
plastics factory.

The good news, if there is any, is that this level of
anti-Chinese resentment and violence has always been bubbling near the
surface in Vietnam.It’s been managed
before, and I’m sure the government in Hanoi hopes it will be able to get the
lid on again.

As for Ukraine, some critics of US Ukraine government and
the government in Kyiv have been rather dismayed and befuddled by the
appearance of a leading scholar of Soviet and Eastern European studies, Yale’s
Timothy Snyder, in the ranks of the regime’s defenders.Snyder is a vociferous supporter of the new,
West-backed government and is the author of numerous seemingly ludicrous
attempts to minimize the ultra-nationalist & fascist component of the Kyiv
regime while striving to paint the Hitler moustache on Putin.

Critique of the regime is much more comfortable if the ranks
of the opposition is limited to over-the-top cold warriors, ultra-nationalists,
and neo-liberal EU loving fantasists, and not authoritative Ivy League profs.

It is presumptuous of me to try to put myself into Dr.
Snyder’s head, however I wish to point out a perspective which to some extent
may explain and justify his position to his detractors.

Poland and Ukraine are two proto-nations whose aspirations
and existence were denied and destroyed by Nazi Germany and Stalin’s USSR
during the twentieth century.

Germany has atoned.Post-USSR Russia did…kinda.Now,
under Putin, Russia is pitching its moral and political debts to eastern Europe
in the wastebasket.Instead of
acknowledging and atoning for the abuses to which it subjected its neighbors—including
hideous crimes like the Katyn massacre, the slaughter of over 20,000 Polish
military officers as part of Stalin’s effort to extinguish Poland as a
meaningful force and national identity; Stalin’s brutal collectivization
campaign that killed hundreds of thousands in Ukraine; and, even more recently,
the Chernobyl disaster—Putin is headed in the opposite direction.

Putin is concentrating on Russia’s own sense of grievance,
its own nationalism, and its own regional aspirations, aspirations that center
on the fate of ethnic Russians and Russian speakers in the eastern European
states and inevitably conflict with aspirations in Ukraine--as Putin seeks to
neuter Ukraine, and turn it into a federalized, helpless buffer against
intrusion from the West.

In the callous realist view—which, I might add, seems to be
the view from most of Europe, including Berlin--agreeing with Putin to
Finlandize Ukraine is a smart, split-the-baby solution.

He sees the current situation as a recapitulation of the
destruction of Poland at the hands of Stalin and Hitler.He perhaps yearns for an alternative future,
in which the West redeems itself for its abandonment of Poland by supporting
Ukraine in its efforts to achieve genuine political, military, and
psychological independence of Russia.

In other words, for Snyder perhaps he sees the struggle in
Ukraine is an attempt to regain moral agency both for Ukraine and for its Western
backers, just as Putin is trying to strip it away.

For most of the world, perhaps, the current crisis in
Ukraine is primarily a dust-up between an inept and hopelessly compromised pro-Western
government in Kyiv versus suspicious and aggrieved ethnic Russians in the east.

Professor Snyder views Ukraine as a colossal moral struggle—The Battle in Ukraine Means Everything, in the title of his most recent piece for
The New Republic.
His hyperbolic critique also takes the rather creepy, borderline racist clash
of civilizations view of Ukraine as a Gotterdammerung between Europe and the
bastard son of Genghis Khan and Fu Manchu, uhm, excuse me, “Eurasia”, an
Orientalizing construct whose rather obvious problems will perhaps come back to
haunt his recollection after he’s cooled off a bit:

All of this is
consistent with the fundamental ideological premise of Eurasia. Whereas
European integration begins from the premise that National Socialism and
Stalinism were negative examples, Eurasian integration begins from the more
jaded and postmodern premise that history is a grab bag of useful ideas.
Whereas European integration presumes liberal democracy, Eurasian ideology
explicitly rejects it. ..

Ukraine has no history
without Europe, but Europe also has no history without Ukraine. Ukraine has no
future without Europe, but Europe also has no future without Ukraine.
Throughout the centuries, the history of Ukraine has revealed the turning
points in the history of Europe. This seems still to be true today. Of course,
which way things will turn still depends, at least for a little while, on the
Europeans.

My personal feeling, in any event, is that politics is a
poor vehicle for moral redemption and Professor Snyder has taken on an
insurmountable task in attempting to regenerate Ukraine as a national and moral
force with the sorry situational and human capital burdening the regime in
Kyiv.

3 comments:

maybe Snyder on Ukraine is in the same position as Brzezinski on Poland: saw collapse of USSR as the chance for East Europe espec. Poland to finally get its place in the sun. Brzezinski also big believer in central importance of Ukraine in post-USSR order. So I think this Centraleurop quasi-messianism is something of a hallmark of serious (perhaps overserious) thinkers in the West

Vietnam's government legitimacy is likewise hinging on their ability to keep their economy going, much like China's.

Which is why interestingly they have made aggressive moves to apologize to Taiwan, rather surprising given that Taiwan's a equally guilty partner in the whole South China Sea thing, and of course, one can thank Mr. Chang Kai Sheik for the whole 9 dotted line to begin with.

The whole thing's actual legal / historical argument is pointless anyway, I can easily make arguments as to why the combined PRC / ROC claim is significantly stronger than their competitors. But that's all kinda pointless if they can't enforce it.

I personally see Vietnam's issue as some cracks in the VC's rule, either internal struggle leaking out or a real outside power trying to out play them. I'm going to guess they did not intend to let the world see them loot a bunch of non-Chinese properties in an anti-China protest. But someone wanted to make them look bad.

As for Ukraine, I'm fairly realist here, if Putin can make it happen, he will.